A good general rule of thumb in life, I think, is never to judge somebody on their worst moment. And so, my reaction to learning, yesterday, that Fine Gael Senator Martin Conway had been arrested on O’Connell Street in a very poor state – which he blamed on a combination of alcohol and sleeping tablets – was one of sympathy. I myself once got so drunk that I fell into a hedge. In my defence, I was about 16.
If, as he says, he simply had a bad night where his medication interacted with alcohol, and all he did was stumble around O’Connell Street, then I think his being forced to resign from the Fine Gael parliamentary party is a tad harsh. Maybe I am a softie but consider me in the “there but for the grace of god”, camp.
But of course, there’s more to it, as Virgin Media’s Gav Reilly correctly spotted:
I’ll quote the Irish Independent here, reporting on the incident to which Gavan refers:
A Fine Gael politician who had to apologise to a female political staffer over his inappropriate behaviour was told he would not be running for the party again.
Yet Simon Harris’s party still ran the politician as a candidate while the Tánaiste was leader, and a minister gave the man an endorsement, telling Fine Gael voters to back him.
The party’s ruling body was not told of the incident when he was endorsed as a candidate. Further details are now emerging of the incident that prompted an internal investigation….
…. Several senior figures in the party contacted this newspaper on foot of revelations about the politician, with concerns being raised about how he continues to be a party representative.
“I’m pretty disgusted. It was made clear to him that his career was finished in the party. He was told, ‘You’ll never run again’. It’s disappointing that he is still there,” a senior party source said.
You do not have to be a genius to translate what is generally meant by things like “inappropriate behaviour towards a female staffer”, though it is worth noting that this refers to a matter dating to 2018, and that there is no investigation ongoing because – according to Fine Gael – an apology was made in 2020, and that apology was accepted.
Still, this is the sort of thing, you’d generally say, that warrants stepping down from the Fine Gael parliamentary party. Not an embarrassing incident of public intoxication.
But of course, he didn’t step down from the Fine Gael parliamentary party over that. Nor, as the Irish Independent makes clear, was he asked to. In fact, he was permitted to run as a Fine Gael candidate for public office while that incident was well known within the party.
All of this poses a fairly obvious, if serious question: It is fairly evident to most people that being forced to stand down for public intoxication is a much more sympathetic situation in which to find oneself than being forced to stand down over accusations that you behaved inappropriately with a young woman. But the net effect of it is that by the time the earlier allegation comes to any further light, Senator Conway will no longer be a Fine Gael Senator. And as such, the headlines are less likely to prominently include the words “Fine Gael”.
All of which might lead a reasonably logical person to conclude that, though genuine, this particular bout of public intoxication was very well timed for the Fine Gael parliamentary party.
There is, of course, another matter here too which is that Senator Conway has just been re-elected to the Seanad as a Fine Gael candidate. In the general course of these matters, we can safely assume that the bulk of the votes which re-elected him came from Fine Gael TDs and Councillors – all of them Fine Gael elected officials. Those TDs and Councillors cannot have been aware that Senator Conway would be arrested for drunkenness a week before polls closed. But a good number of them had to be aware of the other allegation. It was not a secret. Indeed, this reporter had heard about it on the rumour mill some months ago.
And they voted for him anyway.
Incidentally, and for the record, I contacted the Senator yesterday to ask him about all this. As is perhaps understandable, he is staying schtum.
So, what’s the bottom line here? The bottom line is that the Fine Gael party was aware, as far back as 2020, of a “metoo” incident involving a politician. There cannot have been a whole lot of doubt about the incident, because the person involved apologised to the victim of the incident “and that apology was accepted”. All the while, Fine Gael Ministers like Helen McEntee and Simon Harris have been telling the rest of us about the need for us all to be “good men”, and to have national conversations about the male predilection for sexual misbehaviour.
But of course, the Senator has now resigned over a matter of public intoxication. So we’ll have no more talk of that, thank you very much. And the ship of state will sail, serenely, ever onwards.
It’s all more than a bit mucky.